Demonisation and the nature of evil in our society

Lauredhel has written this morning about some of the public discussion about the Churchill arsonist – specifically, about the way everyone is attributing his arsonist behaviour to the fact he was once jilted by a woman.

I agree with her on that, but I don’t think that all the public discourse is about trying to find someone else to blame (and I don’t think Lauredhel is saying that it is).

Rather, I’m wondering how much we’re over-demonising him, and – while I think that the act of arson is horrific, especially in the circumstances in which Sokaluk is alleged to have acted – I think it’s important to recognise that he’s human.

I don’t believe in categorical “evil” in humans – I believe that people can do some pretty bad shit, and there are people I never, ever want to come across – but the dipolar nature of “good” and “evil” is too clear-cut for me to believe in.

Demonising someone allows us to believe that this person is not like us; that he is completely separate and outside our society; that it will never happen again, because next time we’ll know what someone who does these things looks like.

So, yes: the setting of a fire that has the potential to do what the fires did last Saturday is a horrendous act. If Sokaluk is proved to have caused any of those fires, he most certainly deserves punishment under our system. But the proof of that act does not necessarily mean he is through-and-through “evil”.

Nor does the possession of child pornography. Again, child pornography is a horrible thing, involving a number of awful acts. But it seems to me that the constant mention of “and one charge of possessing child pornography” contributes to the demonisation of Sokaluk rather than having any particular news value. He’s in the news because of the charges of arson and of causing death by fire. The child pornography charge is not relevant to those charges. If it was just the child pornography charge, he would not be in the news at all.

So the reporting of this charge sounds to me like: “look how bad he is, he even possessed child pornography”.

To be honest, it makes me wonder: what did he have, one Bill Henson photograph, or a photo of a niece or nephew in swimmers on a summer holiday?

Ok, that’s being a bit glib about it. Nevertheless: I certainly do NOT hold the view that “the police wouldn’t charge him if he wasn’t guilty”. Rather, I most definitely would believe that the police, when they searched Sokaluk’s house, were actively looking for evidence of anything that could possible be criminal. That’s not to say that I believe the charge is trumped up or lacks evidence, or that the evidence was planted, just that the police probably looked a bit harder than they might usually do.

Which means two things: they would maybe be more likely to find something like child pornography, but they might also be more likely to see something as child pornography.

(By the same token: I think we can be pretty certain that if he’d had anything vaguely like a drug in his house, there’d be drug charges, too.)

And that, like the reporting, is part of the demonisation of Sokaluk.

Again, if it’s proved he did any of these terrible acts – arson, causing death by fire, or possessing child pornography – he deserves to be punished under our system.